Madame Bovary (52 page)
Authors: Gustave Flaubert trans Lydia Davis
He did not abandon pharmacy at all; on the contrary! He kept up with the latest discoveries. He followed the great chocolate movement. He was the first to bring
cho-ca
and
revalentia
to the Seine-Inférieure. He waxed
enthusiastic over Pulvermacher hydroelectric belts; he wore one himself; and at night, when he took off his flannel vest, Madame Homais was quite dazzled by the sight of the golden spiral in which he was almost lost to view, and she felt a redoubling of her passion for this man, bound tighter than a Scythian and as splendid as a Magian priest.
He had some handsome ideas for Emma’s tomb. First he proposed a broken column with drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of rotunda … or perhaps “a pile of ruins.” And in every plan, Homais doggedly included a weeping willow, which he considered the obligatory symbol of melancholy.
Charles and he went to Rouen together to see some tombstones at a monument maker’s—accompanied by a painter, one Vaufrylard, a friend of Bridoux’s who spouted puns the entire time. At last, after examining a hundred or so drawings, ordering an estimate, and making a second trip to Rouen, Charles decided on a mausoleum whose two principal sides were to portray “a guardian spirit bearing an extinguished torch.”
As for the inscription, Homais could find nothing as beautiful as:
Sta viator
, and he could get no further; he racked his brains; he kept repeating
Sta viator
… At last, he discovered:
amabilem conjugem calcas
! And this was adopted.
One strange thing was that Bovary, though he thought about Emma continually, was forgetting her; and he despaired as he felt her image slip from his memory even in the midst of his efforts to hold on to it. Every night, however, he would dream about her; it was always the same dream: he would go up to her, but just when he was about to clasp her to him, she would rot away in his arms.
For a week he was seen entering the church every evening. Monsieur Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave up on him. In any case, the priest was disposed to be intolerant, and fanatical, said Homais; he would fulminate against the spirit of the times, and every other week, without fail, he would include in his sermon an account of the last agony of Voltaire, who died eating his own excrement, as everyone knows.
Despite the frugality in which Bovary was living, he was nowhere near paying off his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any of the notes.
Seizure became imminent. At that point he turned to his mother, who agreed to let him take out a mortgage on her property but at the same time sent him a flood of recriminations against Emma; and she demanded, in return for her sacrifice, a shawl that had escaped Félicité’s ravages. Charles refused it. They quarreled.
She made the first overtures toward a reconciliation by proposing to take the little girl to live with her; she would be a help to her in the house. Charles agreed. But when the time came for her to leave, all his courage abandoned him. This time the break was complete and irrevocable.
As his feelings of affection for others weakened, he clung more tightly to his love of his child. She worried him, however; for she would cough sometimes and had patches of red on her cheekbones.
In constant view, across from him, thriving and merry, was the family of the pharmacist, who had every reason in the world to be content. Napoléon helped him in the laboratory, Athalie was embroidering a fez for him, Irma cut out little paper circles to cover the jams, and Franklin could recite the multiplication table all in one breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.
Not so! A secret ambition consumed him: Homais wanted the cross of the Legion of Honor. He had no lack of qualifications:
“One, that I distinguished myself, at the time of the cholera epidemic, by my limitless devotion to duty; two, that I published, at my own expense, various works of use to the public, such as …” (and here he cited his treatise entitled
On Cider, Its Manufacture and Effects;
also, his observations on the woolly aphis, sent to the Academy; his volume of statistics; and even his pharmaceutical thesis) “not to mention the fact that I am a member of several learned societies” (he was a member of only one).
“Lastly,” he exclaimed, with a pirouette, “if only because I acquit myself with distinction as a fireman!”
Then Homais was drawn to those in Power. He secretly performed considerable services for Monsieur the Prefect at election time. In short, he sold himself; he prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign in which he begged him to
do him justice;
he called him “our good king” and compared him to Henri IV.
And every morning, the apothecary would pounce on the newspaper looking for his nomination; it was never there. At last, unable to stand
it any longer, he had a star-shaped section of lawn designed within his garden to represent the decoration, with two clumps of grass growing out at the top to imitate the ribbon. He would walk around it, his arms folded, meditating on the ineptness of the government and the ingratitude of men.
Out of respect, or out of a sort of sensuality that made him proceed slowly in his investigations, Charles had not yet opened the secret compartment of the rosewood desk that Emma had been in the habit of using. At last, one day, he sat down in front of it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Léon’s letters were there. No possible doubt, this time! He devoured every one, down to the last, then searched every corner, every piece of furniture, every drawer, behind the walls, sobbing, howling, wild, out of his mind. He discovered a box and staved it in with one stamp of his foot. Rodolphe’s portrait leaped to his eyes, surrounded by overturned love letters.
People were surprised at his despondency. He no longer went out, received no one, refused even to call on his patients. Then they claimed he
was shutting himself up to drink.
Now and then, however, some curious person would hoist himself above the garden hedge and stare with amazement at this savage man with his long beard, his filthy clothes, weeping aloud as he walked.
In the evenings, in summer, he would take his little girl out with him and go to the cemetery. They would return home after dark, when the only light in the Square was in Binet’s attic window.
Nevertheless, he could not savor his grief to the full, for he had no one close to him who could share it; and he visited Mère Lefrançois from time to time so that he could talk about
her.
But the innkeeper listened to him with only one ear, having, like him, her own troubles, for Monsieur Lheureux had at last started his transportation service, Les Favorites du Commerce, and Hivert, who had a great reputation for running errands, was demanding an increase in wages and threatening to go work for “the Competition.”
One day when he had gone to the market in Argueil to sell his horse—his last resource—he met Rodolphe.
They turned pale when they saw each other. Rodolphe, who had merely sent his card, first stammered some excuses, then grew bolder and even had the nerve (it was very warm, this was in August) to invite him for a bottle of beer at the tavern.
Leaning on his elbows opposite him, he chewed on his cigar as he chatted, and Charles was lost in reveries in the presence of this face that she had loved. He felt he was seeing something of her once again. It was amazing. He would have liked to be this man.
The other went on talking about plowing, livestock, manure, uttering banal phrases to fill all the gaps into which some allusion might have slipped. Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed this, and in the mobility of Charles’s face, he could follow the progress of his memories. It was turning crimson little by little, his nostrils were contracting and widening rapidly, his lips were quivering; there was even a moment when Charles, filled with a somber fury, fastened his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in a kind of terror, stopped speaking. But soon the same dismal lassitude reappeared on his face.
“I don’t hold it against you,” he said.
Rodolphe had remained silent. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a dull voice, with the resigned tone of endless suffering:
“No, I don’t hold it against you anymore!”
He even added a grand phrase, the only one he had ever spoken:
“Fate is to blame!”
Rodolphe, who had determined the course of that fate, found him very compliant for a man in his situation, comical even, and rather low.
The next day, Charles went to sit on the bench in the arbor. Rays of light passed through the trellis; grape leaves traced their shadows on the sand, jasmine perfumed the air, the sky was blue, cantharis beetles buzzed around the flowering lilies, and Charles was suffocating like an adolescent under the vague outpourings of love that swelled his grieving heart.
At seven o’clock, little Berthe, who had not seen him all afternoon, came to call him for dinner.
His head was leaning back against the wall, his eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and he was holding in his hands a long lock of black hair.
“Papa, come!” she said.
And thinking that he wanted to play, she pushed him gently. He fell to the ground. He was dead.
Thirty-six hours later, at the apothecary’s request, Monsieur Canivet came. He opened him and found nothing.
When everything was sold, there remained twelve francs seventy-five
centimes, which was used to pay Mademoiselle Bovary’s fare to her grandmother’s house. The old woman died the same year; Père Rouault being paralyzed, it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor and sends her to work for her living in a cotton mill.
Since Bovary’s death, three doctors have followed one another in Yonville without success, so promptly and thoroughly has Monsieur Homais routed them. He himself has an infernally good clientele; the authorities treat him kindly and public opinion protects him.
He has just been awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor.
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| EPIGRAPHS | |
| xxxi | To Marie-Antoine-Jules Sénard: Sénard was the lawyer who successfully represented Flaubert when he was tried, following the first, serial publication of Madame Bovary in La Revue de Paris , on charges of posing a threat to morality and religion. This dedication, thanking the lawyer, was added when the novel appeared in book form. |
| xxxiii | To Louis Bouilhet: Bouilhet, a poet, a native of Rouen, an early friend of Flaubert’s and his closest from the age of about twenty-five on, spent nearly every Sunday with Flaubert during much of the time Flaubert was working on the novel, often giving him valuable critical responses to his work. This dedication was the only one in the first, serial form of the novel. |
| PART I | |
| 3 | busby: A cylindrical military headdress made of fur with a bag hanging from the top down one side. |
| 5 | the Quos ego: A threat of punishment; in Virgil’s Aeneid , I, 135, these are the words spoken by the angry god Neptune as he is about to chastise the disobedient winds in order to help Aeneas in his journey. |
| 5 | toque: A flat-topped, brimless cap. |
| 5 | ridiculus sum: Latin for “I am ridiculous.” |
| 6 | an enlightened thinker: The French term is philosophe , which means, literally, “philosopher” but refers in this context to the group of Enlightenment thinkers, scientists, and men of letters that dominated the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century and contributed directly to the Revolution; it included Voltaire (see note to p. 68), Diderot (see note to p. 294), and Rousseau, whose novel Émile proposed progressive theories of early childhood education. |
| 7 | Angelus: The bell announcing the time for the Angelus, a Roman Catholic devotion said morning, noon, and evening. |
| 8 | first communion: Communion is a Christian sacrament in which bread and wine are partaken of as a commemoration of the death of Christ. In the Catholic Church, children usually aged about seven are intensively prepared for their First Communion with instruction in church doctrine in the form of the catechism; the day of their First Communion is then celebrated with great ceremony. |
| 8 | Saint-Romain fair: A fair held every November in Rouen. |
| 8 | Anacharsis: Perhaps this was Jean Jacques Barthelemy’s The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece , a learned imaginary travel journal and one of the first historical novels. |
| 8 | baccalaureate: In the French educational system, the degree conferred following the examinations that conclude secondary, or high school, studies. |
| 8 | the Eau de Robec: A tributary of the Seine that ran through the poorest neighborhoods in Rouen; the waterside dyeworks emptied their wastewater into it, hence its sordid, multicolored appearance. In present-day Rouen, the rue Eau de Robec is lined by restored half-timbered houses; the tributary itself has been mostly paved over and remains as a narrow, contained stream crossed by footbridges and flowery decorative arches in the cobbled pedestrian street—a picturesque tourist attraction. |
| 9 | materia medica: The branch of medical science covering the substances used in the treatment of diseases. |
| 9 | stamping his feet against the wall: That is, standing as he ate and stamping his feet against the wall to warm them—as Flaubert makes clear in earlier drafts. |
| 10 | Béranger: Pierre Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) was a popular French lyric poet whose first collection of songs was published in 1815. Flaubert did not have a high opinion of him, as he remarks in a letter: “There are some things that allow me to judge a man immediately: first, an admiration for Béranger …” |
| 10 | public health officer: A public health officer, as opposed to a licensed physician, was allowed to practice medicine only within a certain département and could not perform important surgery without a doctor present. This certification was eliminated in 1892. |
| 10 | livres: The livre was a monetary unit whose value fluctuated over time, but which was here equivalent to a franc. |
| 10 | Mère Bovary: Mère and Père (“Mother” and “Father”), when used with the last name, are terms of address replacing “Madame” and “Monsieur” when speaking to or of a woman or a man of a certain (advanced) age. They are less formal terms and may—but do not necessarily—imply affection or condescension (see, e.g., Balzac’s novel Le Père Goriot ). |
| 11 | leagues: The league is a unit of distance that varied according to time and place but for Flaubert at this time was equivalent to about 2.5 miles. |
| 12 | celebrating Twelfth Night: The French is faire les Rois (“to act or play the Kings”). In this Catholic tradition, dating from the sixteenth century, people celebrate Twelfth Night, or Epiphany, by dining or supping with friends or family and sharing a cake in which a bean has been hidden—the one who finds the bean will enact the part of one of the Three Kings. |
| 12 | his young lady: In French, sa demoiselle —that is, his daughter. |
| 13 | cotton nightcap: A man, in those days, generally wore a cotton nightcap to bed, and a cotton nightshirt. Instead of the nightcap, he might wrap a scarf around his head, as Charles does later. A woman also wore a cotton nightcap, one that tied under the chin, along with a nightgown. There was more fear of the night air then, and not only was one’s head covered but the bed was usually hung with curtains to keep out the drafts, and it generally stood against a wall, perhaps in an alcove, as does Charles and Emma’s bed later in the book. |
| 13 | eau-de-vie: Literally “water of life.” This is a clear fruit brandy with a very light fruit flavor and a high alcohol content, made typically from pears, apples, plums, cherries, raspberries, or peaches and produced by fermentation and distillation. It is usually not aged but bottled right away, and drunk fresh, often after dinner as a digestif. Similar drinks are German schnapps and Czech slivovitz. |
| 14 | Dieppe ivories: The seaport of Dieppe, in Normandy, was the center of French ivory carving from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, ivory and spices being two major imports during that time. Thomas Jefferson, for one, owned a set of chess pieces carved from Dieppe ivory in the late eighteenth century. |
| 14 | calico: A plain cotton fabric. |
| 14 | orrisroot: A preparation derived from the roots of several varieties of irises; it is cleaned, dried (to concentrate its aromatic essential oils), and reduced to a powder; it smells like violets and gives a nice scent to linens. |
| 14 | saltpeter: The common name for the chemical compound potassium nitrate. Forming naturally in white efflorescences or “brushes” on a wall, often of a stable or a cellar, it looks like a tuft of soft fiber. |
| 14 | Minerva: In Roman religion, the goddess of wisdom, medicine, the arts, commerce, handicrafts, and war, commonly identified with the Greek goddess Athena. |
| 14 | lorgnette: A pair eyeglass lenses equipped with a short handle on one side for holding them in front of the eyes. They were not only of practical use but also carried or worn by women as a fashion accessory. |
| 15 | farmyard: Flaubert uses the word masure , italicizing it—it is the Norman term. |
| 15 | the leather of her ankle boots: On a farm particularly, it was the centuries-old custom, persisting even today among some populations, to wear wooden shoes or clogs ( sabots ) over one’s slippers or shoes when going outside, or in the kitchen, in order to protect them. Clogs could be carved at home, or they could be bought at a market. (See the mention of the sabot makers’ hut on p. 142.) The modern-day equivalents, made of molded hard plastic, are still sold in French markets. Emma’s clogs would have had thick heels and soles. Her boots, fitting inside the clogs, were of a thin, delicate leather, with, probably, low heels. |
| 16 | Madame Bovary the younger: Confusingly, there are in fact three “Madame Bovarys” in the novel: Charles’s mother, sometimes referred to as “the elder Madame Bovary” or “Madame Bovary senior” or “Mère Bovary”; Charles’s first wife, sometimes called, as here, “Madame Bovary the younger”; and Charles’s second wife, Emma Bovary, after whom the novel is titled, who at this point in the story is still “Mademoiselle Rouault” but who, later on, will also be referred to as “Madame Bovary the younger.” (Likewise, “the elder Monsieur Bovary” is Charles’s father.) |
| 16 | tapestry work: Embroidery on canvas resembling woven tapestry. Embroidery of one sort or another, along with drawing and music, was part of the traditional education of a middle- to upper-class young lady, and she would usually continue, throughout her life, to occupy some of her leisure hours doing embroidery. |
| 17 | scarifying: That is, lacerating him or flaying him: here, Flaubert, son of a doctor, is deliberately employing a medical term that, in surgery, means to make scratches or small cuts (as in the skin). |
| 17 | pilings: In a seaside region such as Dieppe, a house built on unstable or wet land would have pilings sunk first, on which its foundations would then be laid. |
| 17 | ecus: An ecu was an old silver coin originally depicting the shield ( écu ) of France on one face and was worth about three francs at this time. |
| 18 | sou: An old coin made of nickel and worth one-twentieth of a franc. |
| 21 | glorias: A gloria is a warm alcoholic drink composed of coffee, sugar, and eau-de-vie or rum. |
| 21 | Around Michaelmas: In this predominantly Catholic country, different times of the year were often designated by saints’ days rather than calendar dates. Michaelmas, Saint Michael’s Day, or the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel falls on September 29. |
| 22 | Maître: Literally, “master,” a term of respect customarily employed when addressing teachers, lawyers, and also, as in this case, big landowners. |
| 23 | jaunting-cars … charabancs … gigs … spring-carts: A jaunting-car was a light, low-set, open, two-wheeled carriage in which passengers sat sideways, either back-to-back or face-to-face; a charabanc was a long, four-wheeled, open carriage with several rows of transverse benches or seats facing forward; a gig was a light, open, two-wheeled, one-horse carriage with one seat; a spring-cart was a light, two-wheeled cart open on all sides, with road springs, used mainly for moving furniture or other goods or for carrying passengers on occasion. |
| 23 | tippets: A tippet is a scarf for covering the neck or the neck and shoulders, with ends that usually hang down loose. |
| 23 | fichus: A fichu is a lightweight, triangular scarf worn on the head or over the shoulders, when it is tied or fastened in front, sometimes tucked into a low neckline. |
| 23 | dress smocks: The smock was a loose, shirtlike overgarment reaching to just below the waist or down to the hips; it was worn over other clothes to protect them; it had typically been worn by farmers and working-class men in France for several hundred years by the time it disappeared in the twentieth century. The dress smock, or blouse de cérémonie , would be worn by a farmer or peasant on a Sunday or another special occasion: it might have little starched pleats at the collar and sleeves or be embroidered with white lace on the shoulders and front; it was usually belted at the waist. The farmer might have inherited it from his father or even his grandfather. (He might also own a redingote, or frock coat, but take it from the back of the cupboard only once or twice a year—say, on Easter.) |
| 25 | nonpareils: Tiny sugared almonds, narrow confectioner’s ribbon, or tiny sugar pellets. |
| 25 | cork-penny: A game in which one puts coins on a cork and attempts to knock the cork over with a quoit or puck. |
| 25 | “under my thumb”: Most likely the game in which one player grips the other by the fingers and attempts to trap and pin down the opponent’s thumb. |